Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
My very dear Sons,
From the earliest times of our Christian era, the faithful have placed a particular importance on the day we call “Sunday,” the Lord’s day, Dies Dominica. Sunday is both the first day of the week and the “eighth day,” so to speak: a symbol of creation in time and a symbol of eternity. Whereas seven signifies, in the symbolic language of the bible, perfection, as with the Sabbath day of the Law of Moses, God’s day of rest after creating the world, eight means perfection taken to a higher plane, perfection that opens up into eternity. Today, not only are we celebrating Sunday, the eighth day, but today is also the eighth day of the Octave of Easter, the eighth day of the eighth day. During the special Holy Year of Divine Mercy we are celebrating this Sunday speaks of God’s exceeding perfection and of his infinite mercy.
Moreover we are celebrating today, in fact, the Feast of Divine Mercy, as requested by Our Lord in His revelations to Saint Faustina Kowalska and as promulgated for the entire Catholic Church by Pope Saint John Paul II, a great devotee of Saint Faustina. Having witnessed the terrible distress of his native Poland, first under the Nazis, then beneath the boot of Soviet Communism, Saint John Paul knew the price of mercy and saw the need to obey Heaven’s request. Thus he made this a feast for the Universal Church.
We too, in our troubled times, are beginning to understand the great need we have for Divine Mercy. International terrorism, the jihad of the Islamic State in particular, is a grim reality that knows no mercy, as we have seen even recently. Its victims around the globe include even the most innocent of civilians—small children.
Closer to home, the continuing decline of our Western world, with its utter contempt for the Law of God, for the unborn, for the institution and sacrament of marriage, is an offense to God and spells ruin for human society. To tell the truth, it is increasingly obvious for anyone who dares consider the thing, that “the axe is laid to the root of the trees,” (Mt. 3:10) as Our Lord said of the people of Israel in His time. In our case, given the state of extreme decadence of our own society, we stand in the gravest danger of more and even worse catastrophes than the toppling of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, soon to be a Saint, put it quite clearly:
We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars, of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other?
The lesson here is that we must turn to Our Lord’s Sacred Heart and ask for mercy for ourselves and for the Church and for the entire world. Then we must live according to the logic and wisdom of the Gospel truth and not according to the dictates of the world.
Many are the courageous men, both within and without the Church, who have worked tirelessly to stop these forms of evil. But nothing seems to be able to hold back the black tide. Perhaps we must remember once again the words spoken by Pope Saint John Paul II:
It could be said that human history is marked from the very beginning by the limit God the Creator places upon evil.
Another name for that limit is simply Divine Mercy. May we strive to obtain this infinite good at this critical hour by our prayers, our tears and our sacrifices. In end it is simply God’s own love, the Love that God is, that makes the gift of Himself, through the open wound in His Sacred Heart to a shipwrecked world caught in the maelstrom of sin. Our way forward is through that opening toward the light.
Amen. Alleluia.
